But the Kinks were nowhere to be found.

No "Arthur." No "Muswell Hillbillies" (save for a brief mention in a sidebar). Most unforgivably, no "The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society." You don't have to be much of a Britpop or Anglo-pop fan to be outraged, or at least puzzled, that the Kinks, the band Ray Davies and his brother Dave started in London in 1963, didn't take at least one spot on the list. Who could beat the Kinks for sheer Englishness? After all, they wrote songs about tea and stuff, didn't they? One possible explanation is that, especially in the U.K., the Kinks had always been more of a singles band. Perhaps the real problem, though, was that the Kinks were too obvious a choice for Q's editors; opting instead to include Duran Duran's "Rio" or Eric Clapton's "Unplugged" would surely start more pub arguments.

But for me, there's no Englishman more English than Ray Davies. Pop music isn't supposed to be a sociology lesson; you can't understand everything about another country and its people just from one songwriter's work. But Davies' view enwraps so much conflict, and so many difficult contradictions, that he's anything but a typical symbol of the generational rebellion that characterized postwar Britain. He's such an anomaly, so balanced and confused at the same time, that it's easy to trust that his England is exactly the right one.

"I was born, lucky me/in a land that I love," Davies sings with swinging abandon in the Kinks' 1969 "Victoria." He's speaking through a character named Arthur, who is, as Davies explains in his self-consciously obtuse but entertaining 1995 autobiography "X-Ray," "an ordinary man like myself, who had been a small cog in the empire and had watched it pass him by." Davies shouldn't be underestimated as an actor (and what are singers if not actors?), but the song's sound, almost unnervingly vital, reveals its deepest truths: It's a serenade to past glory that treats its subject like a movie star. Davies pours love into the chorus as if it were sugar; brother Dave offers a guitar motif so gorgeously filigreed it's fit for a royal's crown.

And that's how a song about a fat, dour-looking queen makes you feel: as if you could leap off the top of a very tall building -- and fly instead of fall.

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Ray and Dave Davies were the youngest of eight children whose ages spanned almost 30 years; the six elder siblings were all girls. The Davies family home was a tiny house in the London suburb of Muswell Hill, although the two brothers spent many of their childhood years apart -- Dave went off to live with one of the sisters, Rene, while Ray divided his time between his family's home and that of his eldest sister, Rosie, and her husband, Arthur (who was roughly the model and inspiration for Davies' first significant concept album, the 1969 "Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire," originally conceived as a musical television drama).

The brothers were never close, and their persistent, crackling sibling rivalry -- which probably wasn't helped much by either Ray's stubborn eccentricities or Dave's loose-screw loopiness -- has become the stuff of legend. It's probably also the thing that gave the Kinks their distinctive character: Ray was the chief songwriter and singer, Dave the lead guitarist and glamour boy. Ray is always acknowledged as the great mind behind the Kinks, but lurking in the shadows of the band's story is the niggling sense that Dave completes him in some way -- or, at the very least, tends to piss him off so much that the tension throws off a creative charge.

Oasis' Liam and Noel Gallagher may make a great show of hating each other's guts, but as squabbling siblings go, they're hardly a patch on the Davies' brothers. The uneasiness between Ray and Dave Davies has fueled a number of Kinks' songs, like the baroque and eerie 1966 "Two Sisters," in which brotherly strife is transmuted into a story about a married woman's envy of her sister's freedom: "She was so jealous of her sister ... she'd throw away her dirty dishes just to be free again." Ray was married, rather unhappily, at the time; Dave was free to play at being a rock star, and allegedly it wasn't unusual to see him running down hotel corridors completely nude except for a pair of pirate boots, with one or more comely conquests in hot pursuit.

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